Many honkyoku have for me, the feel of an improvised work. I imagine that
perhaps someone long ago played a melody that came from within quite
naturally, and after exploring countless variations on this personal
song, arrived at a moment when it felt right to write it down or pass it
along. Such a personality seems to live in many of the phrases we now
study and memorize. Yet it is the compositional integrity of these works
that makes them masterpieces, and keeps them
recognizable across styles and eras, and keeps them musically intact.
So it seems that immersion into these classics teaches both refinement of
musical vision as well as the natural flowering of improvisational
skills. The unfolding of a work in the actual playing and in the
deepening of one's interpretation over a lifetime is a path of discovery.
What there is to be discovered is by it's nature unexpected. The
Shakuhachi is the craft one utilizes for the journey. From the
perspective of this microcosm of sound experience we participate in
life's mysteries that can not be felt any other way.
To play a Kyorei or Mukaiji or Koku and feel the presence of others who
played the piece before us is a reality more memorable that the one of
our ordinary day. Whether or not one teaches, I believe the playing and
hearing of a work sends the "messages" that a piece is steeped in "out"
into the present world. And perhaps the colors and flavors of a new
player become blended in, in some subtle way. It seems that putting one's
"personal stamp" directly on a work is a crude approximation of a
profound natural process.
Some of us hear a steady stream of music all day long on one level or
another. If honkyoku fits the "instrument" of the daydreaming mind, it's
a match made in heaven when one finds the shakuhachi. Like the full
western orchestra, it need to be absorbed in detail over many years.
Composers of complex large scale works "hear" every instrument- through a
process of development of the musical imagination. Whether improvisation
is spontaneous or carefully honed into a perfect form, it employs the
skill of taping into part of the creative mind that is basic to human
existence. Basic like the need for light, love, survival- existing in all
people but to varying degrees.
My students love to improvise, but I have to keep encouraging them to
uncover the worlds that wait ahead in intimacy with the classics of
shakuhachi literature. The technical demands are great, but eventually
the lines between immobilization and interpretation blur. Or simply
merge.
Daniel Nyohaku Soergel
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